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Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Does God Play Electric Football?

One of my first memories is of walking into a room where my cousin
Charles and some of his friends were playing electric football. As I remember
it from over 50 years ago, the game looked something like this:

Play was simple: both players lined up their men, the power was turned
on, the “field” started to vibrate, and the men would do battle with each other. Each football man had two
plastic membranes that stuck down from the base that would propel him forward
when the field vibrated. If the player on offense called “Pass” or “Kick,” the
power would be turned off so the player could load the “ball” into a
spring-loaded catapult and either “pass” or “kick” it.

I’ve forgotten what the rules were, but you could have complete,
incomplete, and intercepted passes, blocked kicks, touchbacks, safeties—pretty
much everything you’d have in a real game except bench-clearing brawls.

The game could even be played solitaire. One person could line both
offensive and defensive players up, turn on the power, stop it for passes and
kicks, and even tip the field to influence the speed and direction of the
players. He could plan strategy for both teams, line things up, and watch how
things played out. In short, he could be one step more involved with life than the
god of Deism.

Which leads me to the God of statist evangelicalism.

I first read about the Christmas
truce of 1914 in the mid-1970s in a book on apologetics (probably but not
certainly Josh McDowell’s Evidence that
Demands a Verdict). While I remember the author’s point being that
Christianity brings peace, I thought at the time, “What kind of religion would
have people shooting at each other after they’ve just ‘made friends’? What bee
ess!”

My question about the truce has haunted me ever since, and, as we were
going through the centenary of the event, I read a few articles about it and
even watched the movie Joyeux
Noël (which takes severe liberties with history). And I’ve come up with
the question that prompted this post.

I’ve also been troubled by a Christian video
series I’ve been attending. The first episode begins with a skit about Red Erwin, who gets his
vision of courageous manhood from his father, who, as he was leaving to fight
in the Great War to End All Wars and Make the World Safe for Democracy, told
his impressionable son that a man has to do his duty whether he wants to do it
or not and no matter how much it costs. Red Erwin did indeed become a model of
courage by willingly undergoing unspeakable suffering to save the lives of his
bomber crewmates (to say nothing of the courage needed to get in a bomber to
begin with) during the war against Japan. Another segment in the series
included an interview with an infantry officer who spoke of the courage needed
to order men off on missions from which most or all would not return and
another with a man who talked about the courage needed to obey such orders.

I don’t doubt that these are all men of character and of courage. But I
wonder about the character of the god they serve. After all, there’s every
reason to believe that on their officers’ orders German and Italian grunts went
on missions they were not sure they would return from. And self-sacrificing courage
is not the unique province of Christendom: the kamikaze pilots (and the 9/11
suicide bombers) went on missions from which they knew they would not return.

According to the evangelical narrative, Red Erwin’s father was duty
bound to join the army, cross the ocean, and kill Germans and whomever else his
commanders (“acting lawfully”) told him to kill. No mention is made of the
moral rectitude of the war. Yet the US had no dog in that fight. If Uncle Sam
had simply said, “Travel to and trade with the belligerent nations at your own
risk,” the US would have suffered no ill effects beyond loss of trading
partners as the Europeans killed each other off. There would likely have been
no Zimmermann
Note, no Hitler, no Auschwitz, and possibly no Soviet Union. As it was, like
most government programs, the war failed to reach its stated goals: it did not
end all wars, nor did it make the world safe for democracy. It ended up being a
glorified (if that’s the right word) family
feud that accomplished nothing more remarkable than setting the stage for
an even worse war.

So let me set the scene: while heretics and fringies on both sides were suffering
persecution because they refused to fight, Trinitarian—Catholic, Lutheran, and
Reformed—Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen, Brits, and Americans lined up against each
other, all their governments having propagated the idea that they were defending
their legitimate interests, yea, their very existence and life itself. The more
noble on both sides assumed that God commands people to “render to Caesar what is
Caesar’s,” specifically people of fighting age to obey their governments,
submit to conscription if such be the law, and go to war. They assumed that we
are to trust that the powers that be, ordained of God, are acting according to
God’s will even if it seems to us that they are not. So there they were, noble
people with the best of intentions shooting at each other.

Does the God of that ethical system care who wins the war, or is he only
concerned that the soldiers obey their governments and fight? If his word to
his people is, “Trust your government and leave the results to me,” how does he
differ from the kid playing solitaire electric football? Since I disagree with
the protasis, I don’t need to answer the apodosis, but I’d like to hear the
answer of someone who pretty much agrees with the protasis.

If he does care who wins the war, why does he care? Why did he let the
Allies win in 1918 knowing that it was the Treaty of Versailles that would
bring on war within twenty years? Why did he let Hitler annex Austria and the
Benelux nations by 1940 and then have him lose the war in 1945? Why did he let
the Prohibitionists win in 1919 and then lose in 1933?

More recently, why would he let the Vietnamese prove that the godless
hippies were right (i.e., that the US wouldn’t go commie if Vietnam did) and
the evangelicals who killed, maimed, and got what they gave were wrong?

I suppose the answer is that God’s ways are inscrutable: we also don’t
know why God chose to have Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery; surely he
could have gotten Jacob’s family to Egypt some other way, but he didn’t, so
that’s that. We don’t know why he lets one side win one day and the other side
win the next: we only know that the Bible says that’s what he does.

But I would respond that despite God’s foreknowledge and whatever part
his foreordination played, Joseph’s brothers were guilty of violating God’s
ethical standards. To the degree that they were godly they would have known
that despite their early success, things would not end well. In the same way, to
the degree that people today are godly, they should know that Uncle Sam is up
to no good because he can do nothing “good” or evil without first violating
people’s property. We should be suspicious of his every motive and every move. The
human heart does not cease to be deceitful above all things, desperately
wicked, and therefore unknowable just because its owner receives a tax-funded
paycheck.

We’ve had a century to see Uncle Sam shamelessly bear bitter fruit. It’s
time to get out of his orchard and cultivate our own trees.

The last video in the series I mentioned gives an example of a family
that did just that in a fascinating interview with Paul Holderfield, pastor of Friendly Chapel Church of the Nazarene in
Little Rock, Arkansas. The son of an alcoholic sharecropper, Brother Paul’s
father realized his need to repent and serve his black neighbors in Jesus’ name
the day in 1955 when the troops came to integrate Central High School and he
found himself refusing to shake the hand of a longtime black friend in the
presence of his white coworkers. First as a volunteer who recruited speakers
and later as the pastor, he built a church that turned the highest-crime
neighborhood in Arkansas into a refuge for the hurting, training his son,
Brother Paul, to wear the mantle after he died.

I have no doubt that ISIS and al-Shabab and Boko Haram and the
Bansimoros hate us because we are Christians, as do Raúl Castro and Kim Jong-un.
I can think of a lot of Republicans and Democrats who do too: the latter go
after us overtly, while the former will use us as long as we serve their
purposes before disposing of us. Red Erwin’s father was a brave man, but I
think he was just as expendable to the government he served so nobly. I’m sure he
could have spent his time more constructively had he considered the possibility
that his perceived duty to obey his government actually ran contrary to his
duty to God. We can do better than following Jehoshaphat and Ahab to their
battles of Ramoth-Gilead.

I’ll end with the story of one who stayed home. While the elder Erwin
was going to war, a man named William Cameron Townsend overheard a woman
shouting to Christian soldiers boarding a troop ship, “Cowards! You should be going
to the mission field!” Townsend accepted her challenge and went to Guatemala as
a colporteur.
While there he became aware of the language barrier between speakers of
minority languages and the gospel, so he founded Wycliffe Bible Translators, at
one time the largest Protestant missionary organization in the world.

The Bible in every language, or the Treaty of Versailles? Is the Great
Commission still in force, or has God given it up for electric football?